Long Suffering Penelope
by Crookshanks22
Summary: The summer after HBP, Penelope Clearwater's life is not going well. Then Arthur Weasley asks her to help him reconcile with Percy. Slightly amended to make it canon compliant through DH.
1. Chapter 1: Penelope

Author note: This story, like all my Penelope Clearwater stories, follows the chronology of the original 1998 edition of _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_, which unambiguously placed Penelope one year behind Percy at Hogwarts. I am aware that the 2004 British edition subsequently moved Penelope to Percy's year, but I am sticking to the original chronology. Works of fiction take on lives of their own once they're released into the public sphere, and (as literary critics have noted with respect to other authors) writers who amend their texts after first publication must always contend with readers who have already become invested in the original versions.

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**Long-Suffering Penelope**

Two years out of Hogwarts, Penelope Clearwater's life was not going well—at any rate, not as well as it should have been. It had been a busy summer for the Clearwater family. Penelope's elder sister, Helena, was the newly appointed, and youngest, member of the mathematics department at the University of Newcastle. Her brother Alan, back from a year spent reading international law at the E.U. headquarters in Brussels, had duly taken his First Class Honours and entered a prestigious set of chambers in Lincoln's Inn. Best of all, perhaps, her younger sister Samantha had just won an exhibition to Balliol. There are not many households in the United Kingdom in which a Balliol exhibition would not be cause for rejoicing, but in the Clearwater household, any academic distinction loomed very large indeed.

Samantha was definitely the daughter of the month.

Meanwhile, Penelope was shuffling papers in a stuffy broom cupboard at the Ministry of Magic. Her official title was Assistant Director of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office. The staff of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office numbered two, so that was not quite as great a distinction as it sounded. Nevertheless, it was—as Penelope reminded herself with daily increasing frustration—an unusually responsible position for a witch two years out of Hogwarts. Penelope's NEWTs had been numerous, her manner mature, her references impeccable, and something had done the trick. Since the ranking staff member, Perkins, only turned up for work about twice a week, she was now, at twenty, effectively the head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.

Her parents found this more worrisome than impressive. Her parents were not the sort of people who believed in disappearing keys.

Besides, it wasn't the sort of thing they could drop into the conversation at dinner parties.

The Clearwaters had greeted the revelation of Penelope's special abilities with ambivalence, not to say denial. They considered eleven-year-old Penelope an unexceptional but nonetheless promising child, and they had other plans for her. In the end, Albus Dumbledore having impressed it on Simon Clearwater that he had little choice in the matter, Penelope went to Hogwarts, curly-haired, shy, small, and alone. In those drafty dungeons, those termite-ridden towers, those worn halls, it quickly became clear that Penelope had, so to speak, the magic touch. She dazzled her Ravenclaw classmates with her precocious ingenuity.

Penelope also proved to have that useful quality, self-control, that so often distinguishes the great witch or wizard from the average. Perhaps that was why her parents, sunk in their academic abstraction, their professorial absentmindedness, had never noticed anything unusual about their middle daughter. To be sure, Nanny Emma, who doted on Helena and Alan, had never liked Penelope much; perhaps she had seen what others had not. Penelope herself, though she had long had a vague intuition that she was a bit different from her siblings, had scarcely been aware of her magical abilities until she was told.

Albus Dumbledore, when she met him, seemed surprised that she hadn't known. So, too, did most of the Muggle-born students she met at Hogwarts. She hadn't had the strange strings of accidents that had plagued most of them.

Apparently she had a surfeit of self-control.

The Clearwaters' attitude towards magic didn't change much after Penelope went to Hogwarts. Her parents, once the initial shock had worn off, ignored her oddity as much as they could, and Helena succeeded in ignoring it almost entirely. Alan, an eerily brilliant and intermittently obnoxious teenager, treated Penelope's wizarding education as one vast joke arranged for his personal amusement. Only Samantha, a faithful little sister with an insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, from international politics to sex, listened with rapt attention to Penelope's tales of Hogwarts classes and common rooms, mischief and mayhem. And even Samantha was not an uncritical observer. As she warmed to the topic, she repeatedly pointed out the limits of Hogwarts's overwhelmingly pragmatic vocational curriculum and, still more troublingly, the limits of what magic could do. Samantha's knowledge of the wizarding world was as deep and profound as that of any Muggle child who had never set foot in Hogwarts Castle could be, and her criticisms generally hit the mark. Somewhere in the course of those midnight conversations over mugs of cocoa on the floor of Penelope's chilly fourth-floor bedroom, it became clear that Alan was not going to be the only eerily brilliant one in the family.

Penelope's parents were happy, but scarcely excited, when she made prefect. Clearwaters nearly always made prefect, whether they went to Roedean (girls) or Winchester (boys). The fact that one of their daughters happened to be a witch made no difference. They complacently assumed that, however bizarre the standards of the wizarding world might be in other respects, Penelope would still make prefect, and Penelope did.

It had been nothing, of course, compared to the blaze of classical, mathematical, and literary glory in which, the following spring, her brother Alan came down from Winchester.

The same year, she passed her OWLs, ten of them (she did Muggle Studies in her spare time), with very high marks indeed, in spite of being petrified for a month by the Basilisk. Her father's comments were, first, that arithmancy sounded a lot like astrology to him, and, second, that he couldn't believe that she hadn't taken a foreign language, and that Ancient Runes, while undoubtedly useful if she aimed eventually to do some historical or archeological research, did not, in his opinion, qualify as a foreign language.

The upshot of it was that Penelope spent the rest of that summer in Rennes, living with a French family, studying French six hours a day, trying to make her parents proud of her again. She liked French well enough, to be sure—the truth was, she herself had been secretly worrying over Hogwarts's failure to offer modern languages, coming as she did from a linguistically capable family—and some days she even managed to like the Chateaubriands. She learned to cook that summer, from Mme Chateaubriand; she still read recipes more easily in French than in English. On the whole, it was a pretty good summer.

For one thing, it was a summer full of owls from Percy.

Percy had dawned on her fifteenth year like a blazing sun on a thicket of insecurity. She was astonished, dumbstruck, when he asked her out. They weren't in the same house, nor yet the same year; she had had a silly schoolgirl crush on him for a while, but she didn't realize he even knew her name. Then all of a sudden she had a date in Hogsmeade, and she spent three tortured nights thinking up what to talk about, making lists of topics, memorizing them, and tearing them up so he wouldn't think her dull. In fact, to her continuing surprise, they didn't run out of conversation that weekend, nor the next, nor the next. Percy seemed to find everything about her fascinating, even her Muggle childhood.

It was six months or so before she realized he was jealous.

Percy thought he wanted the background Penelope had. He thought he wanted the slender, tweedy, gray-haired parents, the academic dignities so lightly worn, the pleasant security of being just poor enough that one couldn't quite afford to spend every winter holidays skiing in Switzerland (they only went alternate years), the casual distinction of the occasional knighthood (Penelope's Uncle David had been knighted for his medical research when she was in her second year at Hogwarts, and of course Grandpa Hume had been knighted years ago for his interminable tomes on political science).

Poor little pureblood Percy.

It was sweet, in a way, that a boy so brilliant, so responsible, so assured, could be at the same time so innocent, so hopelessly and utterly naïve.

For the longest time, he didn't touch her, and she wondered if she had misunderstood. Maybe he hadn't meant to be asking her out, exactly. Maybe he was just trying to make friends. And she kicked herself (metaphorically) for being disappointed, because she was lucky, at Hogwarts—a place where she was very much respected but not so widely liked—to have such a friend.

Then one day he pulled her into the vacant History of Magic classroom and asked if he could kiss her. She said, "Sure." He kissed her so hard he nearly knocked the desk over.

So it turned out she hadn't been wrong after all.

They dated for more than two years, and those two years transformed Penelope's impression of Hogwarts. In those two years she grew up poised and confident, under a mask of gentle smiling reserve. In those two years her haphazard, bookish knowledge of the wizarding world (gleaned from volumes like _An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe_ that she traded with Hermione Granger in the dusty carrels of the Hogwarts library) was polished under Percy's adept tutelage. In those two years she came, finally and late, to see herself as someone who could charm, who could hex, who could transfigure—someone who could, in fact, survive and make a success of life in the wizarding world.

In short, she realized she was a witch.

Even when Percy came down, following a triumphant year as Head Boy and a glittering galaxy of NEWTs, she hadn't realized there was anything wrong.

They broke up suddenly, in one of those squalid, blazing rows of the sort that people do have when their first real love affairs shatter and burn. They had the row mostly by return of owl, and Penelope wasn't sure who had suffered the most: she or Percy or Hermes. In the end Percy had, reluctantly, apparated into the Clearwaters' shabbily elegant Georgian rowhouse in Hampstead. They sat in the chilly parlor, among the first editions, the dried flowers under glass, and the faded red silk furniture, and ranted and raved and wept while fifteen-year-old Samantha eavesdropped from the stairs.

Percy had even had the nerve to hint that she was too young for him. That he was a grown-up now, that he was Barty Crouch's personal assistant, destined for greatness, and she was just a schoolgirl, a curly-haired little Ravenclaw prefect still worrying about her NEWTs.

The actual age difference between them was, of course, eight months. And Penelope, coming from a family of Muggles, of educated and moneyed Muggles, had, even at seventeen, seen a great deal more than Percy had, faced a much wider variety of persons and settings and situations. Even at seventeen, she had made choices and transitions and leaps of faith that poor little pureblood Percy could scarcely comprehend.

She said what she thought. He got pretty angry. And that was that. That was it. The end.

Percy disapparated, and Samantha emerged from the stairs and said unhelpfully that he wasn't bad-looking, not at all, glasses or no glasses, but he seemed pretty short-tempered, and was he always like that?

Her seventh year at Hogwarts was a dark and bitter one, mostly spent studying for NEWTs with a grim and joyless determination, enlivened only by a short-lived flirtation with a Beauxbatons boy who liked her mainly because she was the only Hogwarts prefect who spoke passable French. The year ended with a bang. A student younger than Penelope was killed, and Voldemort rose again.

After that came the equally joyless task of planning her future.

It had been exceedingly hard to explain to her parents that there was no Oxford or Cambridge of the wizarding world. It had been even harder to explain that she was not going to take three or four years out of her wizarding life to come home and get a "proper" university degree. More than once, her parents had hinted that she could simply give up on it all. They had hinted that her mother was a personal friend of the dean of Somerville. They had hinted that arrangements could be made. They had hinted, in increasingly plain language, that Penelope's whole wizarding life was a little sketchy.

They didn't know how close she had come to saying yes.

They didn't know how tempting she found it, then, to close the book on her whole wizarding life, to slam the door, to come home and sign herself, "Penelope Clearwater, Muggle."

Three things stopped her. One was the war. One was Percy, or the idea of Percy. One—and it was probably the most important one—was her parents' principle, instilled in her from early childhood, that there were few crimes greater than wasting one's natural abilities.

If she was a witch, so be it. Sometimes she hated the whole magical world, but the magical world needed her. She went to work for the Ministry.

She moved home. Alan's acne had cleared up, and Samantha was ten inches taller; otherwise, nothing much had changed in the seven years since she went away. Her father was still absorbed in his theorems; her mother was writing yet another book about the inherent instability of Third World democracies. The manuscripts on Third World democracies had been a constant feature of Penelope's childhood. They rotated from time to time. Every five or six years, one would get published, there would be a flurry of BBC interviews, of academic speaking engagements, some provincial professor of politics would make a nasty remark about one of the footnotes, and then another book would be started.

It wasn't that Penelope objected to books. At eighteen, in those last lonely months at Hogwarts, she had penned the first couple chapters of her own book manuscript, which analyzed basic charms and transfiguration spells in terms of Newtonian physics. It was a topic that had long intrigued her. The only problem was that she couldn't imagine any audience for the book whatsoever, aside from Hermione Granger, possibly Samantha, and of course Percy, who wasn't speaking to her.

Still, she felt impelled to write the book. Even if no one else would ever read it, there was so much she needed to think through, so much she needed to know. Penelope had spent far too many Hogwarts holidays snooping around her siblings' bedrooms. Samantha, home from Roedean, littered her bedroom floor with physics and chemistry texts, and Penelope combed through them, trying to teach herself the Muggle science she would otherwise never have the chance to learn. Even after she went to work for the Ministry, she spent one entire August vacation teaching herself solid geometry, calculus, and statistics from Samantha's A-level maths notebook, a frustrating experience. Long practice had taught her to decipher her sister's crabbed handwriting (in those long years at Hogwarts, it had been Samantha, and only Samantha, who answered her owls), and she did understand some of what she read. But she had no one (save Samantha, now seventeen and deeply preoccupied with hemlines) with whom to discuss it, nor would she ever have any opportunity to use what she had learned.

_She_ would not be taking up any Balliol exhibitions. She was a witch, and she had been educated as such. Her education was now over, and work was on the menu. But still she longed for more. She still found herself thinking from time to time, I'm not just a witch. I could have made a pretty good Muggle. I'm not quite as brilliant as Alan, I'm not quite as brilliant as Samantha, but I could have made something of myself as a Muggle, all the same. If I hadn't been snatched from my home when I was eleven years old, by a nice old man with a reassuring manner, who said I was magic.

If I had gone to Roedean.

Two years out of Hogwarts, Penelope still lived at home. Her parents, skeptical as they were of all things magic, were nonetheless fiercely protective of this, their most unusual daughter. One fireplace in her parents' home had been connected to the Floo Network, by special dispensation of Cornelius Fudge himself, and she flooed herself daily to the Ministry. She was making good money for a witch her age and, since her parents refused to accept a Galleon for room and board, the little cache in Gringotts was piling up. She had, one summer evening, dragged her uneasy mother and a miniskirted and goggle-eyed Samantha to Diagon Alley, where she pointedly displayed her bank balance (gold was so much more impressive than a checkbook!) and bought Samantha copies of _Hogwarts, a History_ and _Dragon Species of Great Britain and_ _Ireland_ at Flourish and Blotts. A week later she dragged them, protesting and fearful, to the Ministry, where several rumply old wizards and witches addressed her as "Ms. Clearwater" and congratulated her mother on her precocious appointment. Celia Clearwater was, in spite of herself, a little impressed. Celia's Uncle Jack had been in the shadow Cabinet for a while in the seventies, though an untimely stroke had unfortunately prevented him from ascending to the actual Cabinet when the opposition at last came to power. If Penelope chose to sacrifice the academic future her mother had envisioned for her for the sake of a political career, Celia Clearwater could console herself that it was in the blood—though, of course, she would have preferred that Penelope's political career go forward in Whitehall.

Penelope herself would far rather have been an academic. She just didn't know how to go about it, not if she was going to live in the wizarding world. She was far too young to apply for a teaching position at Hogwarts. Besides, she wanted to do research, and Hogwarts didn't seem to be the place where witches and wizards did that. So she tried the Ministry. She didn't like it overmuch, but she still hoped she could do some good there. She had already discovered, in seven years as a Muggle-born student at Hogwarts, that there were a great many pureblood witches and wizards who did not care, who found it positively amusing, if Muggles were bewildered and tormented by disappearing keys.

As the horizon darkened and the rallying Death Eaters shattered the last slender strains of normality in the wizarding world, Penelope realized that her choice had been made. As the war stabbed and bloodied the once placid surface of her parents' world, she knew she was stuck.

Her parents neither believed nor understood a word she said about Voldemort. Her father, who had studied engineering for a couple terms before he realized that number theory was his true calling, had his own theory about what had caused the Brockdale Bridge collapse. He drew her a diagram. He drew several. Helena, who had never studied engineering but had the supreme confidence that comes with being the newest and youngest member of the mathematics department at the University of Newcastle, had her own theory, and she drew some diagrams too.

Poor Muggle Helena. Poor Muggle Dad.

It was sweet, in a way, that two people so brilliant, so responsible, so assured, could be at the same time so innocent, so hopelessly and utterly naïve.

In Alan's room, picking over the shelves of abandoned schoolbooks left from his years of glory as the star classical scholar of Winchester College, she found a bilingual edition of the _Odyssey_. She stayed up all night that night, and she read all about long-suffering Penelope.

She thought about staying at home while others saw the world.

She thought about living a life warped by a war that she didn't particularly want to fight.

She thought about loving a man she wasn't sure would ever come back to her.

She thought about being miserable and alone and spinning an even thread.

She wondered if it was just a coincidence that her parents had named her Penelope.


	2. Chapter 2: Arthur

**II**

There is a gentle knock at the door. It opens, and a middle-aged man in worn robes, with red hair thinning over his scalp, pokes his head in.

"Penelope?" he asks mildly. "Am I interrupting you? Do you have a minute?"

She nods. She says, "Arthur, come in."

He comes in and he shuts the door. He glances, sheepishly and reminiscently, around the outsized broom cupboard that was, for so many years, his office.

They have been friends for more than a year now. Penelope, aged nineteen, had scarcely been Assistant Director of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office for a week when Arthur first came to call, stuttering, apologetic, and congratulatory. He explained—with every appearance of regret—that he had once inhabited this office and had now been promoted to a position that was essential to the war effort and that did not involve Muggle artifacts, whether ill or properly used. He welcomed her heartily into office, tactfully explained the failings of Perkins, and assured her that she would enjoy her new position. He seemed to know quite a lot about her. He didn't tell her how he knew what he knew.

They hit it off, Penelope and Arthur, and they talk often now, voraciously and often, over morning coffee, over afternoon tea, over lunch in the Ministry cafeteria. They talk about making a career at the Ministry. They talk about feeling sidelined. They talk about families, about her siblings and his children. The talk, most often and most eagerly, about the Muggle world beyond their doors. He ogles the misused Muggle artifacts on the shelves in her office, the biting teacups, the disappearing keys, a vicious bathroom door that battered the shins of an elderly Muggle couple in the middle of the night and now hangs, shackled and ashamed, from the ceiling of Penelope's broom cupboard. Penelope has shown Arthur the first three chapters of her book manuscript and flushed under the warmth of his outspoken and innocent pride. She has even endeavored, without much success, to help him understand why airplanes stay up.

There is only one thing, one person, they do not discuss. His name has never passed between them. Penelope is certain, morally certain, that Arthur knows who she is. Who she was. How else would he have known so much about her? Penelope never met Percy's parents, in all those two-odd years of dating him; Percy never seemed to want her to. All the same, she is certain, morally certain, that Arthur knows who she is—who she was—and that there is a reason why he never speaks his name.

Now Arthur stands, wringing his hands, on a tattered scrap of carpet in her tiny office. He summons Perkins's chair to the center of the room, knocking parchment and misused Muggle artifacts to and fro. He points his wand at the chair, rotating it to a comfortable height, and he sits.

"How are you?" he asks, as if it's the most important question in the world.

"I'm fine," says Penelope. "I—well, I'm fine. How are you?"

"I'm fine," says Arthur. "I—well, I'm worried." He scarcely needed to tell her that. She can read it in every line of his face. But then, she has never seen him, not once, when he wasn't worried. It has been a worrying year.

They talk often now, voraciously and often, over morning coffee, over afternoon tea, over lunch in the Ministry cafeteria. She knows he's worried about Bill, who's just married a girl he doesn't like much, and whom he feels guilty about not liking. She knows he's worried about Charlie, who's getting restless in Romania. She knows he's worried about Fred and George, who, flushed with business success, wallowing in unfamiliar riches, and clad in lurid dragonskin clothes, think they're invincible—and aren't. She knows he's worried about Ginny, who is clever and feisty and reckless, who ran off from Hogwarts on a thestral and got mixed up in a battle with Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries when she was only fourteen. If a girl does that at fourteen, what will she do next? She knows, especially, that he's worried about Ron.

She knows more about that than he realizes he's told her.

She knows, too, that he's worried about how Molly's taking it all. He's worried about Minerva McGonagall's heart condition and he's worried about Hagrid's brushes with the law. He was worried when Remus wasn't seeing Tonks, and he was worried when Remus abruptly announced they were getting married—at once— though he's relieved now that they went through with it. He is worried about whether the Order of the Phoenix can survive without Dumbledore, he is worried about whether the Order of the Phoenix can survive without Snape, and he was worried when he realized that he had just told Penelope about the Order of the Phoenix, which he wasn't supposed to do, but oh well, he's done it now. In a world full of things to worry about, that is the least of his worries.

Through all this, through all these long quiet hesitant conversations over coffee and tea, he never mentions Percy. Once or twice, he has inquired, in a discreet, paternal manner, about her love life, but she hasn't told him much. There's nothing much to tell. She hasn't been seeing anyone, because everyone else is boring after Percy. No one knows enough, no one's read enough; her standards are just too high. No one else can stand what Penelope considers relaxing dinnertime conversation. Even the Muggle-borns treat Muggle science as a childhood illness they escaped. Arthur and Percy are the only two wizards she has ever met who expressed even the faintest curiosity about the laws of Newtonian physics.

Now Arthur sits on a twirly chair in her tiny office, picking at the frayed cuffs of his robes, and she can see that he didn't come to talk to her about Newtonian physics. She assumes something has happened to Ron, or possibly to Ginny, because Ginny sounds like a handful, even worse than Samantha, but it's just possible, she thinks, that Scrimgeour or someone else who shouldn't know too much has found out something about the Order of the Phoenix.

He opens his mouth, and he says, "You know my son Percy."

Penelope's heart sinks. She has been longing for news of Percy for a year, but she realizes now that she really, really, really does not want to talk to Arthur about Percy. She's been hurt by Percy, and he's been hurt by Percy, and she knows that he's been hurt, and for all she knows, he knows that she's been hurt, but she doesn't want to lay that burden on his shoulders now. She doesn't want Arthur to know that she still loves his son, who isn't speaking to her, and she fears she cannot let a sentence about Percy escape her lips without revealing, all too plainly, that she loves him. Still, she forces herself to say, "I do."

And then she qualifies it. She says, "I used to."

Arthur looks stricken.

"We broke up three years ago," says Penelope. "I—I've scarcely seen him since."

Arthur's expression softens into gentle, hopeful sympathy. "He always spoke very highly of you," he says. "He always put a lot of stock in your opinion."

"He isn't speaking to me," says Penelope with quivering self-control.

"He isn't speaking to me," says Arthur painfully, in an unthinking echo. "He came to the Burrow on Christmas Day, with Rufus Scrimgeour. He said hello to Molly and he hugged her, but he wouldn't say a word to the rest of us."

Penelope has no answer to that. She has long since heard the story of Percy's Christmas visit, but she didn't hear it from Arthur. She heard it from Tessa Templeton, Rufus Scrimgeour's very bright, very good-looking, very nosy press witch.

"He wouldn't look at me," says Arthur.

Penelope is silent.

"Will you talk to him?" says Arthur. He sounds like a little boy, a pleading little boy, balding and careworn.

"Arthur, Percy isn't speaking to me," says Penelope gently.

"I don't know what else to do," says Arthur. "I'm sorry to ask this of you. When Dumbledore died . . ." He hesitates. "I'm doing dangerous work," he says, looking at the biting teacup on the shelf above her head. "So is Bill," he says, looking at the vicious door shackled to the ceiling. "I think—Ginny—Ron—I don't know—who next." He says, "Molly's sick with worry."

Penelope looks at him and thinks, Molly's not the only one. And she wonders about the "dangerous work." She knows what happened to Bill. She knows a lot about Ginny and Ron. She hadn't quite realized, somehow, that Arthur was doing dangerous work, because he never talks about himself. Always about others. Muggle customs, Muggle artifacts, reckless friends, and reckless children. Worried wife and frustrated dreams. But never himself, never his weekend work, never the risks he's taking.

Middle-aged, jovial, balding, and scruffy, he reminds her in the oddest way of Albus Dumbledore. He is, like Dumbledore, the father she pined for. But Dumbledore was too brilliant, too gifted, too experienced, too old, almost, to die, and Arthur's just a person. A kindly person, a reliable person, a parental person.

A person to whom it's hard to say no.

In the end, she doesn't say no. She says vaguely, as she used to say to Samantha when Samantha asked the impossible, she says vaguely, "I'll try."

Not until Arthur leaves does she wonder if he realizes quite what he's asked of her.

Arthur, like Percy, is a wizard to the bone, schooled to expect the impossible, tutored in unpredictability, ridden with naiveté.

Penelope is Muggle-born, raised in the conviction that what's broken is broken, schooled to accept all the limitations of the physical world. The limitations of the physical world have been weighing ever more heavily on her shoulders as she comes face to face with adult life.

Limitations can be comforting sometimes. Limitations can be all right. The Muggle world does not breed such frail hopes of reconciliation, such romantic clinging to dying flames. Muggle schools do not breed the hot reckless integrity, the do-or-die drama that Hogwarts seems to breed. Muggles are allowed to give up sometimes. Muggles are allowed to be humble, as Penelope would like to be humble. Muggles are allowed to be salary men. Muggles are allowed to be children.

In the Muggle world, she thinks, biting her lip, no one would think she was grown up at twenty. In the Muggle world, she wouldn't have a job. She'd be reading physics at Somerville or Balliol, or if she felt rebellious, at Cambridge, not an exhibitioner perhaps, but a safe First all the same.

In the Muggle world, no one expects to marry her teenaged sweetheart. It isn't done, it just isn't done, not, at least, among the sort of Muggles that Penelope knows. Her parents were both past thirty when they married, leaving trails of brief failed relationships behind them—which is normal, these days, for a couple of Oxford exhibitioners. But in the wizarding world, a good many people do marry their teenaged sweethearts, and it generally works out well.

It is one of the few concrete advantages of living in the wizarding world.


	3. Chapter 3: Percy

**III**

She sends a paper airplane to his secretary. Interdepartmental memo. She claims to be the contact witch for the Burmese ambassador, and she requests an appointment with Percy. Forty-five minutes. Burma is a country that doesn't exist anymore, but Percy, being a pureblood, probably doesn't know that. Percy was home-schooled by his mother, and wizard children rarely learn geography. "Burmese ambassador" sounds nice and important, and she is confident she will get an early appointment. She does.

Two days later, at two minutes to eleven, Penelope, smoothing her hair and trembling slightly, strolls into Percy's office. He looks up from the memo he's writing and meets her eyes. An ineffable expression suffuses his face—some confusing mixture of sadness, terror, and delight.

"Penny," he says, and memories gush into her consciousness. "Penny." And then he remembers something, and he rushes into speech. "Penny, I'm sorry, I'm terribly, terribly sorry, I have this ridiculous long appointment with the Burmese ambassador, and I would so like—"

Penelope sits down on the armchair in front of his desk. She says, "That would be me."

Percy blinks. He doesn't know that Burma doesn't exist anymore, but he is reasonably certain that Penelope is not the Burmese ambassador. He says, "I thought you were the Assistant Director of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office."

It is Penelope's turn to blink. "How did you know that?" she asks.

He opens a desk drawer. He removes a file folder and shoves it across the desk. It contains the program from the Hogwarts Prize Day, two years ago ("Derwent Charms Prize—Penelope Clearwater. Dearborn Transfiguration Prize—Penelope Clearwater. Special Award for the Best Essay in Muggle Studies—Penelope Clearwater . . ."), two Ministry newsletter articles that mention her in passing, and a tiny clipping from the _Daily Prophet_, announcing her appointment to the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.

There is a small earthquake in Percy's office. Or maybe just in Penelope's chair. Or maybe just in Penelope. She looks at the clippings, and she looks at him. He's lost weight, and he looks like he hasn't slept in a month. His eyes are bloodshot and baggy. He is twenty-one years old—or will be, his birthday is next month—and already she can see strands of grey among the red.

She likes the haggard look. God help her, she likes the grey hair.

But she has a job to do, so she clasps her hands and takes a deep breath and says, "Percy, I've been talking to your father."

"You know Dad?" asks Percy, who never introduced her to his father.

Penelope nods. "We're friends," she says, "we have lunch every week." Percy doesn't know this, because being Rufus Scrimgeour's extremely important special assistant, he gets food sent in everyday and rarely sets foot in the Ministry cafeteria.

Percy takes this in. And then he says—"How's Ginny?"

Penelope blinks. "She's fine," she says. "She was just made Gryffindor Quidditch captain."

"Ron?"

"He's fine."

"Did he get together with Hermione?"

Penelope has no idea how Percy knows enough to ask this. She would not put it past him to clip newspaper articles about his siblings, even though he hasn't spoken to them in two years, but Ron's prolonged and inconclusive teenage relationship with his Muggle-born friend is unlikely matter even for the scandal-starved _Daily Prophet_.

"No one really seems to know," she says frankly, "but I think they always liked each other."

"What does my dad say?"

"He says he likes Hermione," says Penelope dryly.

Percy lowers his voice and glances around nervously as if he fears his office is bugged. Which is not impossible, come to think of it, now that Rufus Scrimgeour is Minister. He leans across the desk and he whispers, "Penny. Penny, there's a terrible rumor going around that Ron is dropping out of school and going off somewhere with Harry and Hermione to try to take on You-Know-Who, just the three of them, by themselves, it's crazy, I'm worried sick, have you heard, do you know—"

And she thinks, he loves his family. He's been a total git to them for the last three years, he moved out, he cut his ties, he sent back his Christmas jumper, and he still loves them, at heart he's still just Ron and Ginny's big brother, same as when I met him at Hogwarts . . .

"They miss you, Percy," says Penelope aloud. "They want you back."

"They hate me," says Percy. "They threw mashed parsnips in my face."

That's a detail that Tessa Templeton hasn't gotten a hold of yet. Penelope devoutly hopes she does not.

"Your father wants to see you," murmurs Penelope, picking her way through this tangled thicket of familial misunderstanding and hurt. "Two of your brothers were almost killed this year—"

Percy does a double-take. "Who?"

"Bill and Ron."

Percy huffs. "I told Ron. I warned him—"

"He got in the way," says Penelope hastily. "No one was targeting him. They—the murderer was targeting Professor Dumbledore, incompetently, and Ron just got in the way. It happened in the Potions study, and Harry shoved a bezoar down his throat."

Percy is silent. "He's all right, I suppose," he says after a minute. "Harry. I suppose he's all right."

"He saved your father's life, too, you know," says Penelope.

"No," says Percy. "I didn't."

She tells him the story of Arthur Weasley and the serpent, as well as she knows it, which is not very well. She did not, of course, hear this story from Arthur. She heard a garbled version of it from Tessa Templeton, a year and a half ago, and then a bit more from Kingsley Shacklebolt, who's a nodding acquaintance in the Auror Office, and she put the rest together from Arthur's cryptic allusions over coffee and tea.

Percy listens morosely to her recitation. "He's taking risks, isn't he?" he says when she finished. "Dad shouldn't do that. It's rotten for Mum, when he takes risks."

"We're all taking risks," points out Penelope. "Some of us more than others. Your family rather a lot. That's why—"

"He's letting Ron go?" demands Percy.

"He isn't_ letting_ Ron do anything," says Penelope. "Ron's of age now. He makes his own decisions." Like you, Percy. Just like you.

"He isn't a saint," mutters Percy, staring into the distance. "I mean—well, he's a nice man. Hard-working. Pretty bright, too, really. But he doesn't think ahead. He's so naïve, so inclined to trust people, to just believe what people tell him. He gravitates to someone like Dumbledore, who's a fine man, of course, I understand the attraction, but then he hero-worships him, follows him in everything. He misses things."

Penelope is silent.

"And then Dumbledore stopped cooperating with the Ministry," says Percy. "He was such a great man. A bit mad, but a genius. Remember how much I admired him at school?"

Yes, she remembers. She remembers a lot of things from school.

"But he stopped cooperating with the Ministry. He always has to strike out on his own, do things his own way. It's dangerous when people don't cooperate with the Ministry."

She thinks he's a little confused about past and present tense. A little confused about whether he's angry with Dumbledore or with his father.

Percy lowers his voice, glancing nervously around his well-appointed office. "He may have been right. Fudge—well, we all missed some things, a year ago, two years ago. He may have been right. That is, I mean, in some respects we _know_ he was right. But it's dangerous, in wartime, if people don't cooperate fully and frankly with the Ministry."

"You think Fudge was a better leader?" asks Penelope.

Reluctantly, Percy shakes his head.

"You think things are better now that Scrimgeour's in office?" asks Penelope.

Percy winces.

Penelope feels a migraine coming on, but she still has a job to do. She says, "Percy, your father—"

"He's lucky he's got Mum to keep him up to snuff," says Percy. "He's really, really lucky. He owes so much to her. I'm not sure he appreciates that—letting the twins go behind her back all the time, pretending he doesn't know what they're up to—he's made things hard for her, I think. I tried to look after all of them—the little ones—before I went to school. It was hard, it was really hard, during the First War, after the war. And he didn't make things easy for her. Most people don't know this, but he went undercover for a year in the First War, just abandoned her, with two babies—that's why she always worries so much—that's why there's a gap—"

Penelope knew there were some things Arthur wasn't telling her. Well, this is one of them.

"I mean, he loves her, I know he loves her, but he didn't really offer her much—"

Penelope is silent.

"You like him, don't you," says Percy. It is not a question.

Penelope nods and swallows and says in a choked voice, "He reminds me so much of you."

Percy reaches out, slowly, with two fingers, and he strokes the back of her hand. He strokes it slowly, and it twists her up inside. It twists her and twists her until she's seventeen again, sprawled on the floor of the Charms classroom amid the dust bunnies and the discarded robes and the cushions that haven't been washed in fifteen years, and Percy is fiddling with the elastic on her knickers, and abruptly she sits up and starts putting her clothes on and announces that dinner is almost over and people will notice if they don't put in at least a perfunctory appearance at dinner. She stands up and she walks out, leaving Percy sitting disconsolately in his underwear on the floor of the Charms classroom.

It wasn't his fault and it wasn't hers. They had a contract, a very precise and explicit contract, so far and no further. They discussed it very thoroughly and rationally, walking around and around the lake. And for a year, the contract worked quite well. But they got older and they stayed together and parts of the contract started to erode. It's not like she tried very hard to stop him. She never thought, I don't want to do this. She only thought, I don't want to do this yet. I don't want to do this now. Not when I have my period. Not when I have a headache. Not when I'm worried about exams. Not on the floor of the Charms classroom, worrying that Professor Flitwick might walk in, because I may be the star Charms student, but he's the Charms professor, and he probably knows how to undo what I did to the door. In another time, in another place, when Percy gets his little flat in Diagon Alley for example . . . but by then he wasn't speaking to her anymore.

He never mentioned it. He never threw it in her face. It played no part in their break-up. He was always happy to see her in the morning, always eager, affectionate, faintly apologetic, but mostly just happy to see her. He got carried away sometimes, and she didn't hold it against him. She needed space sometimes, and he didn't hold it against her. They were as happy as a prince and princess in a fairy tale, until the end came.

And she thinks, it's astounding, fifteen and sixteen, sixteen and seventeen, we had a better relationship than most of the married couples I know. He understood me, he simply got it, and no one else ever has except sometimes Samantha.

She hasn't spoken to him in three years, but he is still the only man she can imagine marrying. She dislikes his politics and she fears his ambition, but he is still the only man she can imagine sleeping with. He is the only path she can see out of the prison of the Ministry, the prison of living in a world where she is needed but has never felt at home.

She too feels a little confused about past and present tense.

And then something impossible happens—something that, Penelope is confident, defies the limitations of the physical world and would defy the laws of Newtonian physics if only the laws of Newtonian physics addressed such things. Percy leans forward and wraps his hand around hers, his right hand over her left, and he struggles into speech.

"Penny," he says, "is it—do we—I wish—is there any way—would you have me back?"

The silence yawns between them.

If it were just about him and her, she would resume exactly where they left off, exactly, today. This minute, now. But it isn't just about him and her anymore. It can't be just about him and her anymore. She can't say, "Percy, your politics are wrong, your ambition is insane, you've been a total git to your parents and your sister and your brothers, but I love you and I'll take you back." Maybe when she was fifteen she could have said it, but not now.

He strokes her fingers. She looks at his grey hair.

"If you make up with your father," she says quietly, groping for words. "If you rein in your ambition. If you make yourself back into the decent man you were at sixteen."

"I still live with my parents," she says quietly. "The house in Hampstead. If you come for me, I'll be there."

* * *

Author note: The next installment, "Almost There," was written before the publication of _Deathly Hallows_ and, unfortunately, does not mesh with it. I am working on a new, canon-compliant installment, "Balliol," which will cover the autumn of DH from Samantha's perspective. I expect to post "Balliol" by September.


End file.
